Responsive Web Design, A Necessity For SEO

The search engine optimization industry is currently moving towards a huge focus put on mobile devices. This happens as there is an increase in the number of searches that are done with the use of such devices. Responsive design is currently acknowledged as a great solution for user experience problems because the website is formatted so that it will look great on any device used to view it.

The multi-platform usability focus is one that is really favourable for SEO, which is one thing that many site owners do not actually realize.

Google Wants To See Responsive Design

Google is definitely the main search engine you want to optimize for and it does currently heavily favour responsive website design. This is because it will make its life easier, guaranteeing optimal user experience for the people that use the search engine.

In the past we saw different sites being created for different devices. This was not such a great approach since it automatically meant that optimization had to be done on various versions of the same site. We were faced with the possibility of seeing duplicate content as Google’s algorithm had problems in seeing multiple versions of the same page.

Thanks to responsive website design, the Googlebot is faced with less work, easily offering better user experience. There is no longer a need to index and crawl separate site versions so search engines will be able to easily analyze website content. For the site owner, this practically means that ranking higher in results is a lot easier.

Having Just One URL For One Site

We already mentioned this but an extra attention has to be put on the topic so that you can understand why responsive web design becomes a true necessity for modern search engine optimization. While there are some situations in which it is possible that different site versions would work better for the overall goal of a site owner, when looking strictly at SEO, creating 2 different optimization campaigns is something that automatically brings in more effort. Responsive design helps a lot in overcoming this problem.

You need to understand that Google will automatically recognize the websites that are created especially for mobile use and will only bring them in higher in results when someone uses an appropriate device. That basically means that the mobile website will not really rank well for the users that use desktops.

As you create mobile versions especially for a site that is optimized, your SEO strategy will start from zero. That is because mobile sites have different HTML code and URL. Google can only treat the site as being a different one, offering it a different authority rating.

The authority that is accumulated by the original site will never carry to a mobile version. This is a huge disadvantage when looking at social shares and backlinks. Responsive design will eliminate such a problem since just one URL is available for all the content. Just one optimization campaign is necessary and you do not need to worry too much about the device that would be used by the visitor.